MEDIACITY: notebook

IPCity: Interaction and Presence in Urban Environments

IPCity (FP-2004-IST-4-27571) is a EU funded Sixth Framework programme Integrated project on Interaction and Presence in Urban Environments.

The research aim of the IPCity project is to investigate analytical and technological approaches to presence in real life settings. Analytically, this includes extending the approaches to presence accounting for the participative and social constitution of presence, the multiplicity and distribution of events in time and space.

Technologically, this translates into developing portable environments for on-site configuration, mobile and light-weight mixed reality interfaces with the ambition to weave them into “the fabric of everyday life”. Methodologically, this calls for moving “out of the lab” with field trials in real settings, applying a triangulation of disciplines and methods for evaluation. These range from interpretative-ethnographic to quasi-experimental approaches and include cognitive science, social-psychological, and cultural-anthropological disciplines.

The vision of the IPCity project is to provide citizens, visitors, as well as professionals involved in city development or the organisation of events with a set of technologies that enable them to collaboratively envision, debate emerging developments, experience past and future views or happenings of their local urban environment, discovering new aspects of their city. This includes:

* Extending analytical frameworks for presence, including the participative constitution of presence, the role of (shared) memory and mutual understanding, temporal fluctuations and interruptions (design for non-disruptiveness).

* Developing an environment for MR interaction prototyping and a platform and toolkit for cross reality content authoring.

* A range of building blocks and components ranging from mobile and lightweight mixed reality for situated participation to semi-stationary outdoor mixed reality environments that exploit the features of the surrounding physical environment.

The showcases include urban renewal projects, large scale events, and explorative edutainment and story telling applications.

IEEE Pervasive Computing
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 15 January 2007
Author guidelines: www.computer.org/pervasive/author.htm
Submission address: http://cs-ieee.manuscriptcentral.com
Publication date: June 2007

IEEE Pervasive Computing invites articles about urban computing: the integration of computing, sensing, and actuation technologies into our everyday urban settings and lifestyles. Successful integration requires taking several facets of the urban environment into account at once. Urban settings frame social behaviors; they encompass architectural forms and features that may or may not be harmonious with given technologies; and they are increasingly but variably permeated by wireless networks and fixed and mobile devices. A key challenge is the great diversity and density of people, devices, and built artifacts found in urban places. Urban computing ranges from city-wide transportation-sensing infrastructure, to services embedded in a cafe, to the bluetooth "aura" of an individual's mobile phone as he or she walks down a street.

We welcome papers on all aspects of pervasive technologies embedded specifically in the city, especially those that combine social, architectural, and technological perspectives. We encourage reports of user studies and other data-gathering exercises; lessons learned from technology designs and deployments; conceptual frameworks for urban computing; and fully worked-out visions for the cities of the future.

Example topics include

* Clicks and mortar: the built environment as a tangible interface to services and applications.
* Archi-tech-ture: designing technology for architecture and architecture for technology.
* Wireless society: accounts of media or bandwidth sharing and other social phenomena that emerge from increasing densities of bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular networks in urban areas.
* Theories of the urban landscape such as space syntax applied to technological embeddings.
* Street riders: applications for transportation systems and vehicular technologies, especially car-car and car-street interactions.
* Citizen sensors: sensors that people wear or carry to measure such factors as pollution levels or the presence of individuals nearby, and especially applications that combine results from across the city.
* Urban interaction: displays, smart posters and other public interaction facilities.
* Digital identity: the presentation of self in digital urban life.
* Sous les pavés, la plage ("under the paving stones, the beach," from Paris, 1968): investigations exploring alternative digital tags, markings, traces, and graffiti.
* Urban experiences: technologies for events such as festivals, mediascapes, other new ways of experiencing the city.
* Come out and play: street games, especially perpetual games, that remix the city landscape as gameboard.
* Downtownware: middleware for smart streets, buildings, buses, pedestrians, and so forth—a key aspect being the highly dynamic nature of these systems.
* The city as a system: system support for metropolitan scale computational abstractions. One example is spatial programming, where tuple spaces are embedded as a location-dependent coordination mechanism, potentially across the city.
* Urban noir: the darker side of urban life: privacy, security ... opportunity or barrier to adoption?
* Real-world deployments: experiences, and lessons learned.

Submissions should be 4,000 to 6,000 words long and should follow the magazine's guidelines on style and presentation. All submissions will be peer-reviewed in accordance with normal practice for scientific publications. Submissions should be received by 15 January 2007 to receive full consideration.

In addition to full-length submissions, we also invite work-in-progress submissions of 250 words or less (submit to Molly Mraz at mmraz@computer.org). These will not be peer-reviewed but will be reviewed by the Department Editor Anthony Joseph and, if accepted, edited by the staff into a feature for the issue. The deadline for work-in-progress submissions is 1 April 2007.

Guest Editors:
Matthew Chalmers, University of Glasgow, matthew [at] dcs.gla.ac.uk
Michael Joroff, MIT, mljoroff [at] mit.edu
Tim Kindberg, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Bristol, timothy [at] hpl.hp.com
Eric Paulos, Intel Research, Berkeley, eric [at] paulos.net

Imagined Landscapes is a two day symposium presented by Cumbria Institute of the Arts’ Centre for Landscape and Environmental Arts Research (CLEAR) in association with the Brera Academy, Milan. The symposium considers the work of leading international practitioners working between and across art forms and with new media technologies to create and explore imagined landscapes.

Aims:
The broad aim of the symposium is to examine the ways in which the artists explore the notion of the imaginary through their work and to critically reflect on how such works can help us to understand our relationship with landscape and the environment, opening up a site for critical exchange and creating opportunities for future practical exploration and theoretical engagement.

**STRATEGIES OF SHARING: THE DEPTFORD.TV PROJECT*
*
How can we produce collaborative work within a creative or artistic context? Which are the complexities of such an undertaking? Which are the strategies of sharing?

Deptford.TV is a research project on collaborative film-making initiated by Adnan Hadzi in collaboration with the Deckspace media lab, Bitnik collective, Boundless project, Liquid Culture initiative, and Goldsmiths College. The project started on September 2005. It is an online media database documenting the regeneration process of Deptford, in South-East London. Deptford.TV functions as an open, collaborative platform that allows artists, filmmakers and people living and working around Deptford to store, share, re-edit and redistribute the documentation of the regeneration process.

Deptford.TV is an open, collaborative project, which means that:
a) audiences can become producers by submitting their own footage,
b) the interface that is being used enables the contributors to discuss and interact with each other through the database.

Deptford.TV is a form of 'television', since audiences are able to choose edited 'timelines' they would like to watch; at the same time they have the option to comment on or change the actual content. Deptford.TV makes use of licenses such as the Creative Commons and Gnu General Public License to allow and enhance this politics of sharing.

Visit http://www.deptford.tv

Digital technologies in Lancaster

Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders

Fast-uk and folly have partnered to present the exhibition Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders which explores the possibilities afforded to artists, architects, designers, and others for the creation of new types of objects, buildings, and products stemming from the increasing use of and integration between digital technologies for design and fabrication. The converging and blurring of traditional disciplinary boundaries is made possible by these technologies, from rapid prototyping to the use of generative and algorithmic software for design.

Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders is an exhibition of contemporary arts and design practice. It is especially concerned with object and spatially oriented disciplines, the use of digital technologies and the convergence of sculpture, product design and architecture.

This exhibition will bring emerging and existing contemporary practitioners and technologies into the public arena and help to make cutting-edge developments in art and technology more accessible. 'Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders' will be held from 29 September - 21 October 2006 at venues across Lancaster city centre in the North West of England. The main exhibition space will be the new CityLab development in Dalton Square .

Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders features:

Gavin Baily & Tom Corby
Human Beans
Simon Blackmore
Brit Bunkley
Future Factories
Simon Husslein
Tavs Jrgensen
Aoife Ludlow
Geoffrey Mann
Justin Marshall
.MGX by Materialise
NIO Architecten
Adam Somlai-Fischer, Bengt Sjln & Usman Haque
Masaru Tabei & Yasuno Miyauchi
Ben Woodeson

Venue: Citylab, 4-5 Dalton Square, Lancaster LA1 4PP, 01524 582114
Date: 29 September 21 October, 12 - 5 pm, Mon Sat.

Conference Invitation
University of Cambridge, 12-14 July 2007

The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars and practitioners from a variety of fields in order to consider how cities make themselves evident in their architectures and topographies and are made evident in the visual culture produced in and about them. It will address both general, conceptual questions of modern urban environment and visual culture and the particular evidence of a case city: Berlin.

The first strand of the conference will assess the role of the evidential in our thinking about modern cities in the wake of the visual and topographical turns in the humanities and social sciences. Topographical and architectural concerns have made inroads into a variety of disciplines and opened up an arena of cross-disciplinary debate. We are concerned here to consider how the contemporary city - from the institutional to the congested, the transformative to the memorial - elicits cultural critical interests, how it displays and engages multiple levels of process and appropriation. At the same time, we wish to explore the ways in which visual culture works to intervene in, and produce alternative forms of evidence from, the urban environment.

The second strand of the conference will seek to take the measure of the different forms of witnessing that have operated in the city of Berlin from its early twentieth-century heyday to the new aspirations of the capital of the Berlin Republic. As a city with a uniquely drastic twentieth-century political history, the parade-ground and battle-ground of profoundly antagonistic regimes, Berlin can claim a paradigmatic status for thinking about the construction of ideology in urban form, about how conflicting interests, present and historical, public and personal, are made evident, or not. Its recent history, whether as a city of trauma or as a global capital of espionage, is laden with experience and activities that challenge conventional ideas of the evidential, in epistemological, ontological, ethical, and juridical terms. The topographical and architectural organisation of the city, and the ways in which this is culturally constructed and represented, are under complex and contradictory pressures: to bear adequate witness to its various pasts and to do justice to its prospects. Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum provides a paradigm case here. At the same time, the official effort of memorialisation and reconstruction is often at odds with the kinds of evidence that are produced more unofficially. The contestation over the future of the Palace of the Republic is only the most recent in a series of culture battles waged in and over Berlin, battles over what should be made evident in, and taken in evidence of, the city.

The conference will involve academic participants from a variety of disciplines both within the University and beyond: architecture and urban studies, cultural history and geography, film and visual arts, political theory, and sociology. It will foster interdisciplinary debate between established scholars of international stature and emerging scholars, including graduate students. And it will do work of cultural outreach, by engaging discussion between academics and a variety of practitioners working at the leading edge of urban environmental development and visual culture. Indeed, several of our contributors cross this divide in their work.

Thematic areas to be included in the conference may cover:

Memory: temporal topographies, trajectories, and traces
Institutions: politics and representation/legislation, partition/inclusion, public/private
Transformations: outside/inside, empty/full, forward/reverse, centre/margin
Visual knowledge: site/sight, surface/insight, surveillance/secrecy


Speakers

The list of those to be invited to participate includes:

Kutlug Ataman (visual artist - Istanbul/London/Berlin)
Victor Burgin (visual artist/art historian and theorist - London)
Tacita Dean (visual artist - London/Berlin)
Ed Dimendberg (film/cultural scholar - Irvine)
Thomas Elsaesser (film/cultural scholar - Amsterdam)
Mary Fulbrook (historian - London)
Daniel Libeskind (architect/writer - New York)
Richard Sennett (cultural geographer - London)
Anthony Vidler (architectural scholar - Cooper Union)
Janet Ward (cultural historian - Nevada)

Details

The conference will take place at the University of Cambridge (UK) and in cooperation with Cambridge University's Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH). The conference will be hosted in the newly developed Cripps Court conference centre of Magdalene College, and it is anticipated that it will be accompanied by screenings of work by attending artists.

The conference will be structured as a 2.5 day event. The two strands of the conference will be distributed over the Friday and Saturday, preceded by a Thursday half day, programmed as an inaugurating afternoon and reception.

A special keynote address, also open to non-delegates, will be scheduled either on the Thursday afternoon as an introductory event, inaugurating the main body of the conference on Friday morning, or closing the conference programme on Saturday.

The conference days will be started off by a special presentation given either by an artist or a scholar of international stature. These will be followed by plenary sessions and panel discussions, and complemented by selected screenings and projections of visual arts material from invited artists.

Contact

Dr. Andrew Webber
Reader in Modern German and Comparative Culture
University of Cambridge

Churchill College
Storey's Way
Cambridge CB3 0DS
(+44) (0)1223 336211
ajw12@cam.ac.uk

Exploration is a Radio Walk | funk spaziergang throughout the Podewils'sches Palais that incorporates different people's experience and engagement with their own daily spaces.

By carrying a portable scanner with a specially constructed antenna, visitors to the building will be able to intercept and visualize video broadcasts located throughout the building that they have to walk through in order to find.

The walks are from October 16 to 31st, Monday-Friday every hour from 1 - 5 pm. Only three can go on a walk each hour therefore reservations are necessary and can be done by emailing me directly. for more information:
http://www.tesla-berlin.de/_page.php?aktion=SHOW_PAGE&Page_ID=270 (in German only)

INTERFACE AND SOCIETY
In our everyday life we constantly have to cope more or less
successfully with interfaces. We use the mobile phone, the mp3 player,
and our laptop, in order to gain access to the digital part of our life.
In recent years this situation has lead to the creation of new
interdisciplinary subjects like Interaction Design or Physical Computing.

Currently we live between two worlds, our physical environment and the
digital space. Technology and its digital space are our second nature
and the interfaces are our points of access to this techno sphere.

This division will dissolve into a seamless distribution of information
technology into most aspects of our life, advertised as ubiquitous
computing. Immaterial information and physical objects will fuse into an
Internet of Things. Our world will transform into an interface as a whole.

Since artists started working with technology they have been developing
interfaces and modes of interaction. The interface itself became an
artistic thematic in its technical, social and political dimensions.

INTERFACE and SOCIETY investigates artistic strategies and practices which
deal with and build upon the transformation of our everyday life through
information technology and electronic interfaces.

With the rapid technological development a thoroughly critique of the
interface towards society is necessary. The contribution of the artist
thereby is relevant. S/he takes the freedom to deal with technologies
beyond form, function and usability. The utilisation of an eclectic range
of strategies and practices guaranties a diversity of results.

Erich Berger (at/fi) - Interface and Society
Bruce Sterling (us/cs) - Spime: a map of ideas
Susanne Jaschko (de) - On the virtuality of public space
Laura Beloff (fi) - Not imagined, it is real
Per Platou (no) - Failure is success (is failure)
Truls Lie (no) - On Guattaris concept of the "machin" as
the mental and social apparatus that directs our everyday praxis
Adam Greenfield (us) - Everyware: Some thoughts on the social
and ethical implications of ubiquitous computing.
Artificial Paradise (uk) - Instruction Sets
Marius Watz (no/de) - It`s all about the software, baby
Sabine Seymour (at/us) - The Epidermis as Interface,
Dynamic Textile Surfaces

website

Street maps of Barcelona are tagged with markers which link through to stories about the city submitted over the web.

betwixt: technology and transitional spaces
Location: University of California, Irvine
Date: September 16, 2006

We frequently encounter transitional spaces in our everyday lives. Sidewalks, highways, lifts, buses, tunnels, stairwells, bike paths, parking lots, lobbies, airports, waiting rooms, train stations, and drive-thrus. But we do more than just pass through these spaces, by acting in and reacting to each of these "non-places" they acquire a character of their own - they become places. A particularly high curb becomes a skater's favorite haunt. A traffic jam on the 405 gives you the chance to read your newspaper and drink a coffee. The path cut through the sandy beach attracts groups of rollerbladers. How can we begin to design technologies that recognize the richness of these transitional spaces? Why aren't these places valued in their own right?

This workshop will explore the transitional spaces of Orange County and consider how they are shaped by cultural practices, values, and attitudes. Designers, architects, artists, computer and social scientists are invited to undertake an investigation into how technology can enrich or subvert the multiple uses of transitional spaces through a day of collaborative fieldwork and design.

Following on from our recent workshop on waiting, Why Wait?, this workshop intends to deepen our inquiry into the topic of "in-between-ness" - what is it, and is it really in-between? While Why Wait began its examination by looking at the ways in which waiting contributed to being in-between from an activity-oriented perspective, Betwixt will center around the more spatial aspects of in-between-ness.

Submissions should be sent to johannab@ics.uci.edu.

Organizers:
Arianna Bassoli ( The London School of Economics )
Johanna Brewer ( University of California, Irvine )
Karen Martin ( Bartlett School of Graduate Studies )